It is spring and the myriad internet companies that burst into bloom in the past few years are being reborn. Only a few months ago, they were cranking up revenue, building brand and ignoring the bottom line. Now, the P-word is no longer "page views" or "promotional budget" - it's profitability.

On Wednesday, we had Amazon.com predicting record pro-forma operating profits for its US books, music and video business for the full year, and positive operating cash flow over the remaining three quarters of this year. This is not to say that the online retailer - which has worn its loss-making status almost like a badge of honour - is in the black by ordinary accounting standards.

It reported a first-quarter, pro-forma loss of Dollars 122m. Go to the traditional bottom line - including charges for goodwill amortisation, Amazon's share of losses at companies in which it invested, stock-based compensation, and merger, acquisition and investment-related costs - and the net loss is Dollars 308m.

EToys, an online retailer that has seen a jarring drop in its share price since Christmas, also has seen the light. On Thursday, it said its core domestic toy business was "well on its way" to achieving profitability in fiscal year 2002. In the upbeat statement that accompanied the results (loss for the quarter: Dollars 36.6m before non-cash charges), Toby Lenk, chief executive, opined that it had "the DNA of profitability". Investors might recall that there were about 25 years between scientists discovering the structure of DNA and being able to use it sensibly for genetic engineering.

It is, of course, churlish to criticise e-tailers and their like for focusing on profit. That is exactly what doubters of the internet stock boom have been asking them to do for the past 12 months. But it is interesting to observe the way internet companies are reworking their strategies deftly to accommodate Wall Street's rather more dour approach to loss-making newcomers.

The dotcom suffix itself was one of last year's quickest route to stock market success. Michael Cooper, Orlin Dimitrov and Raghavendra Rau, at Purdue University in Indiana, actually studied the effect of adding a dotcom and produced a paper last summer entitled "A rose.com by any other name" (available from rau@mgmt.purdue.edu).

They concluded that there were abnormal returns of about 80 per cent in the 10 days surrounding the announcement that a company was to adopt the gilded suffix, and that the effect was relatively durable. "A mere association with the internet seems enough to provide a firm with a large and permanent value increase," they noted.

But the suffix that buoyed up the sector last year has proved a heavier burden in 2000. According to figures prepared for the FT by CommScan, a research group, shares in the 102 US listed internet companies with a dotcom or dotnet suffix fell by more than 50 per cent between the peak of the Nasdaq Composite index on March 10 and Tuesday's close. The 350 internet companies without the suffix held up only marginally better. At the bottom of the list, Resourcephoenix.com, which handles accounting operations and electronic business services for companies, has fallen by more than 80 per cent since mid-March.

Some branding and naming agencies now are advising clients not to adopt the suffix and there have been a couple of amputations. Infospace.com, which provides commerce, information and communication infrastructure services, signalled the peak of the market on March 1 when it decided to drop the dotcom. Naveen Jain, chief executive officer, insisted then that InfoSpace was more than just an internet company. Coincidentally, it produced its quarterly results on Thursday - a pro-forma net profit of Dollars 1.9m.

Meanwhile, among the existing dotcoms, only two - Barnesandnoble.com and Mapquest.com - are in positive territory since the March 10 Nasdaq peak.

It seems that the appetite for companies to signal themselves as pure internet investments might be falling away. In years to come, the dotcom tag could come to be seen merely as an interesting relic of the internet boom, in the same way that many companies marked previous technological booms by adding Semiconductor or Cyber- to their names. andrew.hill@ft.com